Wilhelm Ostwald

Suffering from illness of the prostate and bladder, this eminent scientist breathed his last on April 4, 1932 and was interred in Leipzig. Later on his remains were moved to the Great Cemetery in the city of Riga.

Born to professional cooper Gottfried Ostwald and his wife Elisabeth Leuckel, on September 2, 1853, Wilhelm Ostwald was their second child. Wilhelm had two more brothers and the family stayed in Riga, the capital city of Latvia.

He completed his early studies from Riga and then attended the ‘University of Dorpat’ for his higher studies. After obtaining his bachelor’s degree in 1875, he successfully completed his master’s degree, the following year.

Ostwald then pursued his Ph. D. in chemistry and worked on his dissertation under the Russian chemist Carl Schmidt, receiving a doctoral degree in the year 1878.

During 1875-1878, he studied the physical chemistry as he felt the area was neglected by the scientific community in Germany who were then focussed mostly on organic chemistry. He dedicated himself to study of the law of mass action of water and chemical affinity occurring in an acid-base reaction.

Wilhelm then accepted a teaching position in 1881 at the technical university ‘Riga Polytechnicum’.

During his tenure at Riga, he embarked on deducing scientific evidence to verify the dissociation theory, propounded by Svante Arrhenius, an eminent chemist from Sweden, in 1884. The same year his first book catering to general chemistry, entitled ‘Lehrbuch der Allegemeinen Chemie’ was written.

A pioneer of physical chemistry, in 1887, he founded a scientific journal for ‘Zeitschrift für physikalische Chemie’ (Journal of Physical Chemistry). He served as the editor of the journal for nearly twenty five years. The same year he moved to the ‘University of Leipzig’, as the head of the department of physical chemistry.

Continuing his work in electrolytic dissociation theory he succeeded in establishing the mathematical proof, which describes the relationship between degree of dissociation, concentration of acid and the equilibrium constant which is unique to each acid. The postulate was named Ostwald’s Law of Dilution, in 1888.

Ostwald was responsible for numerous path-breaking discoveries in the field of chemistry but his work on chemical equilibria undoubtedly remains his most important contribution. He studied the basic principles regulating the equilibrium in a chemical reaction and derived the formulas for calculating rate of reactions which holds good till date.